24 August 2013 1:24 PM

I was on LBC last night, talking about the revised growth figures published earlier in the day. No-one likes to be a dog in the manger (I don't, at any rate) but I did urge listeners to be cautious about any claims that our economic injuries are healing fast.

Yes, the second-quarter growth figure was revised up from 0.6 per cent to 0.7 per cent but gross domestic product is still more than three per cent below its pre-crisis peak.

Furthermore, even with the upward revision, the year-on-year rate is a miserable 1.5 per cent, well below the two per cent minimum thought necessary to stave off unemployment, there being roughly a two per cent annual rise in productivity.

City analysts have raised their growth forecasts a little - a month ago the average estimate was for one per cent this year and 1.7 per cent next year. Now they have growth at 1.2 per cent this year and 1.9 per cent next year.

Still below the magic two per cent, in other words. And economies exist not for their own sake but for the benefit of the people they serve. As I pointed out in an economic bulletin I was writing earlier this week, earnings growth continues to lag significantly behind price rises.

Four words tell the tale: we are getting poorer.

1) Put out the flags?

THE fact that those growth numbers were helped by a better than expected foreign trade performance triggered talk in some quarters that the great rebalancing of our economy away from consumption and towards manufacturing and exports,

A little reality check is in order. The balance of payments has not been in surplus since Michael Foot's Labour Party was scythed down at the polls by Margaret Thatcher's Tories, Michael Jackson's Thriller album was flying off the shelves (for reasons that have always baffled me) and Michael Caine and Julie Walters were lauded for their performances in the film version of Educating Rita.

Don't bother running these nuggets through Google - it was 1983.

What we are talking about here is a culture of low expectations. We manage to sell some products abroad and suddenly we are the new Germany. We managed to host an athletics competition last year and suddenly all our problems were over, we had rediscovered our pride and shown the world what we could do.

There was a time before league tables when a school friend came across our normally-equable head of English in a despondent mood. It was a boys' school, so staff members' daughters went to the local girls' grammar. My friend enquired as to the cause of the master's gloom, to be told that he, the master, was heartily fed up with the school putting out the flags whenever it managed to achieve A-level results that would be routine and unexceptional at the establishment attended by his daughter.

It seems the whole country has now developed the same condition.

2) You've come a long way (sort of)

I have been working in Victoria this week and was quite taken aback by how corporate and spruced up it has become, with shiny glass office blocks and the constant roar of redevelopment. As with many a Sussex kid, Victoria was my gateway to London and as a teenager I vaguely imagined that, with Buckingham Palace round the corner and the Catholic cathedral right by the station, this was a smart part of Town.

By the time I realised that not only were there far smarter parts (Kensington, or Mayfair, for example) but also that Victoria was actually quite scruffy and seedy I was quite fond of it for what it was. I remember in the very early Eighties a buffet on the station called The Downs, the first establishment that I can recall with a total smoking ban, although this was largely ignored. Across from the station was a place called (I think) The Great British Disaster Restaurant (no, I've no idea why either).

There remains, by an entrance to the Tube station, a relic of the old days, a cafe with Formica tables and clouds of steam billowing from behind the counter.

But for how much longer?

3) The day before yesterday

AS expected, I am enjoying enormously Alwyn W. Turner's new book A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (Aurum; £25). It is a tribute to the author that I will occasionally find myself recalling what I was up to at the time. For me, the decade really kicked off in March 1990, when - there being no-one else available - I was dispatched by The Guardian to cover a G7 finance ministers' meeting in Paris. The communique was in French with no English version in sight. As I subjected the document to my schoolboy French, Chris Huhne, who was there for The Independent, sportingly helped with the translation.

On my return to London, my taxi driver gave me a blow by blow account of the Poll Tax riot that had rocked the capital while I had been swanning round in the city of light. My colleague Larry Elliott had been quite sympathetic to the protestors until he learned they had smashed the windows of Cafe Pelican off Trafalgar Square, after which he insisted that only the sternest measures would suffice.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan